Review of Royalty Networks’ web hosting

RN provide excellent value for money. I have never hit my limits for domains, bandwidth or disk space.

The network is reasonably good and the speed is fairly uniform around the world.

Cons

Email

Looking back over my six years’ support tickets, I’d say that a large fraction were due to email problems. Email is not a new or rare technology so it often surprises me how many problems I have with their email system.

Support

The support offered is their biggest weakness.

Although they claim to offer “support around the clock”, I always have to wait at least 12 hours, sometimes 24 or 36, for a resolution to my issues.

I often have to go back to state that the fix it not working. In a recent example, I explained the problem and explained how to test whether it was working. The support staff had apparently not bothered to use the test I detailed as part of their work, otherwise they would have seen that the fix was ineffective.

Control Panel

I administer my domains using the provide HSphere control panel. It is not very good. I have reported many defects but still no fixes are provided. Defects include incorrect validation of IIS configuration options (it says that valid macros are invalid). the use of radio buttons instead of checkboxes for some configuration options (meaning you can only select one option instead of the several that IIS supports), and back-to-front explanation of IIS options (the “allow” list is presented as the “deny” list).

Migration

I internally migrated my sites from a server running IIS 6 to one with IIS7. This was a real pain. Many of my options were not migrated properly, and most of my sites stopped working because the correct version of the .net framework was not applied. This was very frustrating, especially when i had been so cautious about the migration and have been reassured that the whole thing was automated and would be smooth.